Kollektsia! Soviet and Russian contemporary art from 1950-2000 in the collection of the Centre Pompidou

September 13th - April 2nd, 2017 / Centre Georges Pompidou

We are happy to announce that our piece titled "SUSPECTS" will be part of the group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou that opens on September 14. The exhibition highlights Russian art in the collection of the Centre Pompidou.

From the Centre Pompidou:

On September 14, 2016, the Centre Pompidou presents the extraordinary gift of more than two hundred and fifty Soviet and contemporary Russian works together with the exceptional support of the Vladimir Potanin Foundation. This body of work has been offered to the Musée National d'Art Moderne through the generosity of the Vladimir Potanin Foundation, collectors, artists and their families. Part of a 2016 years under the sign of a tribute to donors from all walks of the project recalls the crucial importance of these actions committed for the development of heritage institutions. The assembly thus formed, consisting of works by major artists, offers a panorama, with no claim to completeness, some forty years of contemporary art in the USSR and Russia, through the main changes that have furrowed.

The presentation reveals the richness of an art born outside the official framework. By the late 1950s, the "unethical" artists like Francisco Infante, Vladimir Yakovlev or Yuri Zlotnikov, stimulated by international exhibitions permitted by policy Khrushchev "thaw" reconnect with the aesthetic practices avant-garde Russians, themselves sources of inspiration for many Western artists. They try to invent their own visual language. In 1962, the closure of the Khrushchev unethical room included in the famous exhibition Manege (Moscow), banned for several years of public space any artistic expression contrary to the doctrine of socialist realism which, from 1930, terminated the modern experiments in the USSR.

The 1970s saw the emergence of two movements with porous borders. School Moscow conceptualist takes a decisive extent on the initiative of Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov of, Rimma and Valery Gerlovin followed Monastyrsky Andrei and Dmitry Prigov. Giving a prominent place to the language, working at the crossroads of poetry, performance and visual arts, these artists offer in the Moscow of "Stagnation" a conceptual art reflecting the primacy of literature in Russian culture. A second generation of artists joined the conceptualist community in the late 1970s, as Mukhomor group, Yuri Albert, Mikhail Roshal, Viktor Skersis or Vadim Zakharov.

Concomitant Moscow conceptualism, Sots art, invented by Komar and Melamid duo away in a pop vein codes of Soviet propaganda. Unlike pop artists, faced with the glut of consumer goods, Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov Boris Orlov or démythologisent the ideological environment of Soviet society. Current fruitful some of the protagonists emigrate in the 1970s, the art Sots brand strongly aesthetics of the years of perestroika, animating the work of different artists like Grisha Bruskin.

In the mid 1980s, the advent of perestroika causes real creative effervescence, impregnated with an underground culture from various squats. A strong feeling of freedom while intoxicated young artists: Sergei Anufriev Andrei Filippov, Yuri Leiderman, Pavel Pepperstein or Pertsy group in Moscow, Sergei Bugaev-Afrika, Oleg Kotelnikov, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe or Timur Novikov in Leningrad.

The end of the decade was marked by the legitimization of this art born in the margins. Market mechanisms of art, even nonexistent, begin to set up: in 1988, the first auction organized by Sotheby's in Moscow, gives tangible value to the unofficial art. Very quickly, the borders with the official art disappear. A new generation of artists is affirmed, including AES+F, Dmitri Gutov, Valery Koshlyakov or Oleg Kulik. From the 2000s, contemporary art is institutionalized and gradually integrating into the national culture.